• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • devil’s advocate, it does have some logic to it.

    • An ambiguous report of an unconscious person could be the result of a crime/attack. Having the police turn up quickly helps with that significantly.

    • As others have said, the police could have been faster to respond.

    • Some people, when coming out of a fit, etc, can be aggressive. E.g. A friend is, apparently a “puncher” when she comes out of a general anaesthetic. She makes it a point to warn the nursing team, when possible. She’s still given out a few black eyes. Having police respond makes sense. They are, supposedly, trained in safe handling of an aggressive person. This makes them ideal for containing someone till their brain reboots, and stops panicking.

    Unfortunately, it sounds like the officers here forgot their duties and training. I’m often horrified to hear how american police tend to operate. It’s the sort of thing you don’t see much of in most developed countries.


  • We are more common than many thing. However, we also tend to self select our groupings. We are a lot less common than WE feel we are.

    Basically, about 50% of my local makerspace are ND. That is way higher than the general populous. However, even within family, work, or random friend groups, I still see an abnormally high percentage. I basically self select for weird people and have done all my life. This seems to be common for many of us.


  • As with many ND hobbies. It sprawls out in almost as many ways as people who do it.

    Some love the massive powerful machinery that is a locomotive. Others are obsessed with the timings and predictability. Still others love the organisational side of things.

    It even overlaps with the model train interest groups. Recreating aspects of the train network, based on their own interests.

    ND hobbyists are a bit like cats in many ways. There’s not much pack drive. We tend to wander and explore interests in our own way, independent of the labels that get applied. It can be broadly grouped, but has a lot of spread.


  • The term “neurodiverse” (or as a friend calls it “neurospicy”) came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other “conditions”. They also tend to blur into each other.

    Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn’t naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.

    Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It’s both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find “normal” to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it’s disproportionately common. We’re not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.

    ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It’s annoying when it’s overused in media, as a catch all term.






  • Nukes and ICBMs are extremely complex devices. They also require extremely specialist servi e work to remain functional. Even worse, the only people who can actually check that work are the ones doing it.

    Russia hasn’t detonated a nuke in decades. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of their arsenal are now duds. The money embezzled, while boxes were ticked. Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of their ICBMs just wouldn’t launch.

    Russia’s nuclear capabilities are likely a paper tiger, and Putin likely knows this. Until they try and use them, they are scary. If they try and they fail, they are in a VERY bad situation.

    Putin is many things, but he’s not stupid. It would take a LOT more pressure from nato for him to even consider using nukes.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtookmatewanker@feddit.ukIs that a promise, Nige?
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    17 days ago

    Smoking was banned in public buildings because 1 smoker could negatively affect a lot of people. If you want to poison yourself, that’s your choice.

    There’s just 2 provisos,

    1. I should be able to avoid being affected by it.

    2. Any costs it created (e.g. medical costs) should be rolled into its tax.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    20 days ago

    You could detect decoherence in the system, that doesn’t indicate a human observer, however.

    That process is, however, used to protect cryptographic keys, transfered between banks. A hostile observer collapses the state early. The observer gets the key instead of the 2nd bank, which is extremely conspicuous to both banks.




  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    20 days ago

    Depends on how you are observing it photons impart energy and momentum. The true, detailed explanation is a lot more convoluted, it’s all wave interactions, in the complex plane. However, digesting that into something a layman can follow is difficult.

    The main point I was trying to get across is that there is no such thing as an independent, external measurement. Your measurement systems minimum interaction is no longer negligible. How that is done varies, but it always changes the target and becomes part of the equations.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    21 days ago

    We know how it works, we just don’t yet understand what is going on under the hood.

    In short, quantum effects can be very obvious with small systems. The effects generally get averaged out over larger systems. A measurement inherently entangled your small system with a much larger system diluting the effect.

    The blind spot is that we don’t know what a quantum state IS. We know the maths behind it, but not the underlying physics model. It’s likely to fall out when we unify quantum mechanics with general relativity, but we’ve been chipping at that for over 70 years now, with limited success.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    21 days ago

    Observer here doesn’t mean the same as the layman meaning. It’s anything that interacts with the system while it’s developing.

    Interestingly, it actually can be used for a presence detector, at least in a sense. You can use it to transfer cryptographic information. If no-one is listening in, about half your sent numbers are wrong, but you can agree on what ones. However, if someone is listening in, all your data gets randomised.

    They actually now use this system to transfer information between banks. They send a random stream of 0s and 1s over a fibre optic cable. They then send (semi publicly) which bits made it properly. If someone spliced into the fibre, they would get the encryption data, but the target bank would not! They know instantly that something is wrong.


  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDon't look now
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    21 days ago

    For those confused, it’s worth noting the difference between observed as a layman concept and as a quantum mechanical one.

    In QM, to observed is to couple the observer to the “system” being observed. Think of it like “observing” your neighbour, over a fence using a BB gun. When you hit flesh, you know where your neighbour is. Unfortunately, the system has now been fundamentally changed. In a classical system, you could turn down the power, until your neighbour doesn’t notice the hits. Unfortunately, QM imposes fundamental limits on your measurements (heisenburg and his uncertainty principal). In order to observe your neighbour accurately, you need to hit them hard enough that the will also feel it and react differently.

    QM behaves in a similar way. Initially, the system is just a single particle, and is not very restrained. This allows it to behave in a very wave like manner. When you observe it, the system now includes the whole observation system, as this coupling propagates, more and more atoms etc get linked. The various restraints cause an effect called decoherence. The system behaves ever more like a classical physical system.

    In short, a quantum mechanical “observer” is less sneaky watching, and more hosing down with a machine gun and watching the ricochets.



  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlocked 🚫
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    22 days ago

    Theories can be a stepping stone to other theories. Until we explore those chains, we don’t know if there is anything useful at the end.

    E.g. initially, lasers were a solution looking for a problem. An interesting quirk possible due to some interesting bit of physics.

    Maths explores idea spaces. Much of that is purely of interest to other mathematicians. However, it sometimes intersects with areas of interest to other scientists, at which point it becomes extremely useful.